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Futurist War Noises: Coping with the Sounds of the First World War

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Futurist War Noises: Coping with the Sounds of the First World War Futurist War Noises: Coping with the Sounds of the First World War Selena Daly It is widely acknowledged that “noise was Futurism’s contribution to music.”1 In spite of this reality, it was not until quite recently that Futurist engagement with noise, as opposed to music, has received explicit scholarly attention.2 The Futurists contributed to the debate on the music- noise dichotomy in two different ways: through the innovations of Luigi Russolo and Francesco Balilla Pratella in re-imagining noise as a kind of music, and secondly through the parole in libertà poems pioneered by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which used onomatopoeia and distortion of syntax to bombard the reader-listener with the impression of noise. This article will focus on a sub- category of noise that has received little attention by scholars of Futurism: war noises. Although the movement had been interested in the nature of noise in general, and war noises in particular since 1911, it was during the years of Italy’s involvement in the First World War that such sounds assumed a greater significance for them. During their combat experiences, these noises would become an inescapable part of daily life, rather than a diverting and provocative artistic tool, as they had been pre-war, and were transformed into a matter of both physical and psychological survival. In the following discussion, I will examine the Futurists’ understanding and interpretation of war noises, focusing particularly on the figure of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and to a lesser extent on other Futurists, including Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo. To date, analyses of Futurist noise have been approached from the perspectives of music, sound studies, and Italian studies,3 and there has been minimal scholarly engagement with noise from a psychological point of view. Marinetti’s innovative experiments with “words-in-freedom” poems have usually been considered as “attempts to capture the spirit of battle as a liberating, invigorating experience.”4 Similarly, the focus on parole in libertà in his writings of the Great War has been interpreted as merely an aestheticization of the battle experience.5 His earliest forays into this area have also been dismissed by critics as “tiresome in [their] simplification and reduction of experience [leaving] him vulnerable to the charge of mere bombast.”6 These analyses overlook the role that the Futurists’ engagement with war noises played in constructing psychological defence 1 Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (1977; repr. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 111. 2 See Christine Poggi, “The Futurist Noise Machine,” The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 14, no. 7 (2009): 821-40 and Wanda Strauven, “Futurist Images for Your Ear: Or, How to Listen to Visual Painting, Poetry, and Silent Cinema,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 275-92. 3 See Barclay Brown, “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo,” Perspectives of New Music 20, no. 2 (1982): 31-48; Giusi Baldissone, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1986; repr. Milan: Mursia, 2009), 170-81; Daniele Lombardi, Il suono veloce: Futurismo e futurismi in musica (Milan: Ricordi, 1996); Poggi; Douglas Kahn, “Noises of the Avant-Garde,” in The Sounds Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 431-48. 4 John White, “Iconic and Indexical Elements in Italian Futurist Poetry: F. T. Marinetti’s ‘words-in-freedom’,” in Signergy, ed. Jac Conradie, et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2010), 137. 5 See Günter Berghaus, “Violence, War, Revolution: Marinetti’s Concept of a Futurist Cleanser for the World,” Annali d’italianistica 27 (2009): 23-43. 6 Marjorie Perloff, “The Great War and the European Avant-Garde,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 150. mechanisms and coping strategies, which allowed them to successfully negotiate the stress of life in the trenches. Although in the immediate post-war period, Futurist interest in war noises significantly diminished, they did not disappear completely from Futurist rhetoric. The topic reemerged in the 1930s, with the establishment of a new genre of poetry—“aeropoesia,” which would communicate the experience and sensations of flying.7 In the Futurist banquets of the early 1930s, the noises of war planes also featured. Marinetti explained how the noise of the engines facilitated digestion and was a “specie di massaggio all’appetito.”8 When the Second World War began, the “aeropoesia” compositions increasingly featured bombardments and military engagements, with a corresponding increase in the presence of war noises. However, very few “aeropoets” were actually pilots or had any flying experience, so these compositions were not eye-witness testimonials of battle experience as the free-word drawings in the First World War had been. Thus, they served primarily aesthetic and propagandistic purposes, and were less immediately related to wartime coping. Further research is required into the long-term effects of the Futurists’ combat experiences and the extent to which noise-related battle trauma remained a psychological reality for them after the Great War, although this lies outside the scope of the current article. The Beginning of Futurist Interest in War Noises (1911-1914) Marinetti was the driving force behind the introduction of the topic of war noises into Futurist discourse following his exposure to combat zones as a war reporter during the Battle of Tripoli in 1911 and as an observer of the Battle of Adrianople of October 1912. Both experiences influenced the development of Futurist literature, as evidenced by the manifestos he was publishing at the same time. The May 1912 “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” stressed the need to introduce the elements of noise, weight, and smell into literature, as well as the necessity to liberate the word by destroying syntax and by abolishing adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation. His first practical experiments in this regard were published in the “Risposta alle obiezioni” of August 1912, entitled “Battaglia Peso + Odore,” which displayed a modest use of bold typefaces, onomatopoeic sounds, and mathematical symbols instead of traditional punctuation. It is here that the first Futurist free-word war noises appeared, with phrases such as “100 metri mitragliatrici fucilate eruzioni violini ottone pim pum pac pac tim tum mitragliatrici tataratatarata.”9 The “typographical revolution” that Marinetti subsequently launched as part of his 1913 manifesto on Futurist literature was much more ambitious in its attempts to overhaul the Italian literary tradition. His experiences in the Balkans in 1912 inspired his free-word novel, Zang Tumb Tumb, published in 1914, and were the most significant for the development of Futurist engagement with war noises. Pratella could be considered the father of Futurist music and noise-theory, but initially he showed no interest in exploring the nature of noise. The first Futurist music manifesto, the 7 On “aeropoesia,” see Willard Bohn, “The Poetics of Flight: Futurist ‘Aeropoesia,’” MLN 121, no. 1 (2006): 207- 24. For examples of wartime “aeropoetry,” see Gaetano Pattarozzi, ed., Carlinga di aeropoeti futuristi in guerra (Rome: Mediterraneo futurista, 1941) and Ennio De Concini, Aeropoesie futuriste di bombardamento (Rome: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1941). 8 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillìa, La cucina futurista (1932; repr. Rome: Banca Tiberina di Mutuo Soccorso, 1990), 81. 9 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Risposte alle obiezioni (1912),” in Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria, 6th ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), 61. Emphasis in the original. “Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi,” issued on 11 January 1911, made no reference to modern, manmade noises or to war-related noise of any kind. Such a reference would only appear in his subsequent manifesto, “Manifesto tecnico della musica futurista” (March 1911), following the intervention of Marinetti: an inserted conclusion to Pratella’s manifesto, without the author’s consent.10 It now declared that it was necessary for Futurist music to “dare l’anima musicale delle folle, dei grandi cantieri industriali, dei treni, dei transatlantici, delle corazzate, degli automobili e degli aeroplani. Aggiungere ai grandi motivi centrali del poema musicale il dominio della Macchina ed il regno vittorioso della Elettricità.”11 After this prompt from Marinetti, Pratella did experiment with the noises of war, most notably in his composition “La Guerra.”12 However, it was Luigi Russolo who would be Futurism’s most important and influential theoretician on the relationship between noise and music. It is important to highlight the fact that the major impetuses towards the development of noise as an element of Futurist ideology came from Marinetti, who placed his parole in libertà firmly in the literary domain, and from Russolo, originally a Futurist painter, who had an interest in music, but was not a trained musician. Luigi Russolo built on Marinetti’s parole in libertà in his manifesto, “L’arte dei rumori,” of March 1913. Although his principal focus was on the noises of the modern city, the phenomenon of war noises was also highlighted through references to Marinetti’s experiments. Russolo was open in acknowledging his debt to Marinetti in this regard, and in order to convey the “orchestra di una grande battaglia,”13 he published an extract from Zang Tumb Tumb in his manifesto.14 Thus, “the emphasis conferred on the fighting sounds of Marinetti’s combat parole situates militarism at the founding of Futurist noise.” 15 Russolo also developed the now-renowned intonarumori machines, which corresponded to different categories of sounds, and had evocative names like “crepitatori,” “gorgogliatori,” “rombatori,” and “ronzatori.” The first “noise-tuner” concert took place in Milan in April 1914, with limited success, but a twelve-night run in London in June of the same year received a much more positive response. A planned tour of cities in Britain and Europe was cancelled as a result of the outbreak of the First World War.
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